Wednesdays 03, 10, 17 & 24 of June
from 18:30–20:30
Price: 120€
J.G. Ballard’s impressive body of work was often described as prophetic. We know this already. His novels from the 1960s, 70s, and 80s diagnosed with uncanny precision many conditions that define contemporary life today: media saturation, psychological exhaustion, catastrophe imagery, and the fusion of inner fantasy with systems of social engineering.
But Ballard’s importance goes further than prophecy.
More impressively still, Ballard’s thought continues thinking the present from within the present itself. His work does not merely “predict” reality. It allows us to perceive it differently.
Among the deepest traps of contemporary life is the trap of the image.
The external world has become increasingly colonized by media landscapes, screens, and systems of managed attention. Often, the image no longer represents reality – it coerces experience to comply.
Ballard was fundamentally a visual thinker. Deeply influenced by surrealist painting – “the greatest imaginative adventure of the twentieth century” – his writing repeatedly attempts to reopen perception from within the image-world itself.
Beginning with “The Enormous Space,” Ballard’s extraordinary short story in which a man seals himself inside his suburban home in order to access an unknown dimension of experience, the workshop moves through media spectacle, architecture, catastrophe imagery, and ecstatic perception in order to approach Ballard as one of the key thinkers of the future locked within the present.
The aim is to conduct an imaginative activation; to discover new perceptual loopholes within the current image-world.
Module 1 – Interiorized Reality: Loophole
The Enormous Space
Module 2 – Curated World: Backstage
The Atrocity Exhibition
Module 3 – A Dream Gone Real: Awakening
High-Rise
Module 4 – Erotic Perception: Life
The Unlimited Dream Company
OBJECTIVES
– to examine J.G. Ballard as a visual thinker; the painting inside his writing
– to explore how Ballard prises the imaginary open from within the contemporary image-world
– to approach Ballard as a classic in Ezra Pound’s sense: “news that stays news”
AFTER THE WORKSHOP
– you will begin noticing structures of novelty within everyday reality
– you will develop a sharper sensitivity toward images and their psychological force
– you will leave with new imaginative tools for thinking beyond the deadlock of the present
FOR WHOM
– for artists, writers, filmmakers, architects, and readers of contemporary culture
– for those drawn to the unstable border between reality and imagination
– for anyone sensing that contemporary reality has become unbearably superficial
BIO
Pawel Jankiewicz is a writer, curator, and founder of Galerie Linger – Art, Books & Press in Berlin, where he regularly teaches workshops and reading groups on art, literature, philosophy, and contemporary culture. His recent seminars have included Mark Fisher and the question of desire under contemporary conditions.
This workshop continues that inquiry through the work of J. G. Ballard, focusing on media landscapes, perception, surrealism, and the psychological structures of the present.
*To sign up for this workshop, inquire at galerielinger@gmail.com
**All materials are included and will be provided upon registration